Intro

Of what is a week composed? Of daily walks, and small routines. Of BBC News in the morning and bringing my 88-year-old mother-in-law to her eye appointment in the afternoon. Of making a shopping list on Saturday and dessert on Sunday. Of packing lunches in the evening and the impromptu visit of a nephew travelling through Winnipeg on his way elsewhere. Amidst these routines and events, the mind flits elsewhere, a stream of consciousness fed by podcasts and books and little projects. Here’s what caught my attention this week…

Intentional effort

When I was young, I thought that “bothering” was to be avoided, as in “bothering” people, and by extension that the point of life was to get to greater ease. I don’t think that way anymore, and the following quote from William James nicely contradicts the idea of wanting to get to “ease”:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. (Via)

In a similar vein is are two interviews of Stewart Brand who is promoting his latest book titled Maintenance of Everything. There is the idea of care - caring for tools, of “honouring the process of taking care of things and yourself and others” and there is the contrast with a world that is increasingly automated. He says at one point: “we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it.” Stuck in line at a bank for half an hour, then with a teller for an hour and 15 minutes to resolve a small issue made me think “here we are, arguing with robots!”. The intentional effort manifested in the form of equanimity - a kind of caring for each other as we’re dealing with these robots.

Environment

Beau Miles recently concluded a series of videos on four different rivers in Australia, ending with the Murray River. I like how he grapples with being unable to end the story on a satisfying note, and how he includes his conflicting feelings in the video… His friend, Brian Wattchow, suggests “Unfortunately it’s going to have to be managed and rules are going to have to be imposed until we can get a whole new set of values and values for the river. It’s sad but I can’t see personal choice and individual responsibility saving the river at the moment.” His argument is consonant with Andri Snær Magnason’s observation on humility toward nature (quoted here).

On the subject of rivers, but in Canada, is the CBC’s Ideas podcast episode “What the River Wants to Be”.

Baking

This week I made Vaughn Vreeland’s Lemon Blueberry Cookies.

There remained, after this recipe, a lot of frozen blueberries left, and so I made a pie. The pie was unphotogenic, but delicious.

Walking the dog

This week, there was a bit of cold weather leftover… just enough to take pictures of the icicles formed on the branches from the preceding days’ higher water levels.

The sun came out, and so there was the view across the water…

I look down when I walk, eyeing the ground, surveilling Enzo who follows his nose everywhere. At one point I looked up and was so delighted to see pussy willows!

The last few mounds of snow that remain covered in grass look like wooly mammoths.

One day this week, we found a frog on our path!

Enzo’s sniffing caused it to raise its arms… “Leave me alone!” So we did…

Happy Sunday!

Welcome to a pot pourri of subjects, this week featuring flowers, flurries and fluids… I mean, really, the only commonality is this stretch of an alliteration… there are flowers… the flurries are featured in a book recommendation about an expedition to the South Pole and fluids… well, that would be wine. My motto is, if you’re bored, I’ll change the subject.

1 Flowers

I do not like these flowers. I mean, sure, maybe from overhead, in contrast to the fence and the stones, they have a lovely dark-green veined leaf and a sculptural trumpet-like flower, in stunning scarlet no less… but every time I look at them, I regret my spontaneous spring purchase. I prefer pinks, whites, and purples, and colour aside, I recognize my taste is subjective.

Take geraniums for example. I remember geraniums lining a windowsill in one of my elementary school classrooms, submissively potted and straining to the light, their dead leaves that crinkled like paper bags being plucked by some teacher, filling the ennuie of a quiet classroom at work, before there were computer screens for that.

In my first year as lady-of-the-flowerbeds in our house, I disdained geraniums and planted any other flower I could. I also disdained petunias. But then, over lunch a few years later, with a certified landscape-architect friend who was my age, we admitted to each other, that on this subject, our tastes in floral beauty had run up against practicality. Dang it if geraniums and petunias weren’t such hardy plants, giving up their colourful blooms all summer-long.

Still… a geranium had yet to cross the threshold into my home’s interior… until last year. (I even documented it). There was the blog post on Gardenista, but then there was this book about interior design, Sense of Place, featuring homes of celebrated interior designers like Penny Morrison, Carlos Sanchez-Garcia and Helen Parker. And all their sumptuously decorated homes feature… well… as the book’s authors, Caitlin Flemming and Julie Goebel call them… pelargoniums. Do you know what pelargoniums are? They’re basically less hardy geraniums. The fact that these homes feature these plants and that they get their own special attention in the captions, well… I guess I could update my taste.

But there are other flowers that have a similar effect… hollyhocks for example. Or marigolds. But see them blooming somewhere else, under someone else’s artistic eye and suddenly your own partialities feel silly and arbitrary.

2 The Worst Journey in the World

It’s not often that you can make a wholehearted, unequivocal recommendation. A tv series we watched could have a caveat, like, “if you like such and such”. And then, so many of our habits are culturally influenced. You watch or read something because that’s what other people are watching, reading, talking about. But this book is a particular gem. It’s written by a person who fell in love with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s story and wrote about how she did in an inspiring downloadable PDF titled to mirror his: “The Best Journey in the World”.

The first volume of Airriess’s graphic novel series was 10 years in the making. It features her skill as an animator and as a writer. Her enthusiasm for research and accuracy is something I too share and these qualities alone are enough to recommend the book. But Airriess imbues the story with something more, which she describes in an interview: “What makes me burn to share this story is the example that these people set, of how to behave when everything goes against you, and being there to support each other and not leaving your friends to die alone. […] We could do with more of that in the world, and I want to show that people can be that.”

See her work here: https://worstjourney.com/

3 Wine

Amy Thielen’s author bio clearly indicates she is a writer and a teacher and so my enthusiasm for her, every time I open Company feels a little late to the party. Still, I cannot help but admire how her cookbook teaches me so much in such an informal way.

Take wine for example. Now, there’s a show like “Drops of God” (Fun series!) that makes you feel like you haven’t been using your nose properly, never mind your taste buds, and you go about sipping a proffered glass feeling like a mole invited to a picnic. But Thielen can talk you down from your ledge with a little section subtitled: “When it comes to drinks, I’m pretty hands-off.” And here’s something I didn’t know… [Talking about wine at the liquor store in the affordable aisle]: “Many of these wines are chaptalized, or pumped up with added sugar at the last minute. Winemakers do this to bring out the grape’s berry-juice-box flavours, which they call fruitiness, but it raises the alcohol content to a head-spinning level. For me, a wine with 14- or 15-percent alcohol had better be well made and highly structured, or it can burn a little going down the throat and tends to dominate the food.” (p 17-8). She offers recommendations, an entertaining secret and then its off to a little introduction on menus… “Locating the exact coordinates of your own hunger is surprisingly difficult. Those of us who tend to think first and feel later will have to push our brains aside for a second and ask the body what it craves. Something fruity? Dark and meaty? Light and loose? Comforting and starchy? Spicy?” Etcetera. I wonder if writing so kindly has won Thielen a whole population of parasocial friends.

4 The dog

Enzo can be an exasperating beagle, with an “aroooo” so loud, the whole neighbourhood is alerted to the cat under the car. But darn if he isn’t a little schnookums in this picture… especially since he’s flattened all my pillows to make himself a bed.

5 The view

The sunlight slant is hastening faster and faster in the evening. Glancing back as I walked away from this viewpoint over the river, it alighted so nicely on the globe of fuzz of a flower gone to seed. It’s tiny amidst all the foliage, just one element among the rest.

Happy Friday!